FCL .055

The incident happened at Dallas Airport on Sunday 24 July 2011. An American Airlines Boeing 777-200 apparently had an engine fire just after takeoff, and was forced to make a U-turn and dump fuel before performing an emergency landing. You can hear the pilot’s voice in the video hereafter as well as a part of the transcript:

This video has become a buzz since yesterday night. The Airbus A380 super-heavy jumbo jet wingtip would have clipped the tail of the CRJ700 according to some reports. The passengers were violently shaken in the cabin of the smaller plane as the Bombadier airplane was instantly pivoted around its yaw axis while… taxiing!!!

Here is the ATC voice communication when the Airbus A380 took out the CRJ700:

… and here is an – outdated – aeronautical chart to understand what happened and where on JFK International’s tarmac:

A Boeing 737-300 has recently been forced to perform an emergency landing after an explosive depressurization due to a rather big hole in its fuselage. Reports suggested that some MRO (Maintenance; Repair; and Overhaul) operations had been outsourced to El Salvador, and might have caused such an accident.

However, the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) said that the last heavy « C » check – the last major MRO operation on the aircraft – was performed at the Dallas Southwest maintenance facilities in March 2010.

The TWU (Transport Workers Union) has condemned the use of aircraft repair stations outside the USA, calling on Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration to toughen the FAA’s oversight – Watch the video: